Shinola Presents: Designing for the Future | Time & Systems

For Detroit Month of Design, Shinola hosts a conversation between Periodicals and an incredible group of artists, designers, musicians, chefs, thinkers and cultural practitioners around the subject of time. Not simply how we measure it, but how we use it, what we choose to carry forward, and how our relationship to time shapes what we make next. 

Across three conversations, Time & Craft, Time & Systems, and Time & Place, this Designing for the Future conversation series considers time as an essential material for building what comes next. Craft looks at what can only be learned through repetition, mastery and patience, and how those skills evolve across generations. Systems considers innovation over time, asking how existing structures, technologies and ways of working can be reimagined to create new possibilities. Place explores how landscapes, homes, institutions and gathering spaces accumulate meaning, becoming cultural touchstones that can connect one generation to another. Together, these conversations probe the idea that designing for the future must explore what deserves to endure, what needs to evolve, and what conditions we create for new ideas and culture to take shape. 

In Detroit, a city with a deep relationship to making, invention and reinvention, time offers a particularly rich way to think about the future. 

Shinola Presents: Designing for the Future | Time & Systems 

Innovation rarely begins from nothing. More often, it happens when we understand an existing system deeply enough to imagine how it might work differently. Time & Systems brings together Femi Adeyemi, Ash Arder, Jennifer Giroux and Mike Banks, whose work across music, technology, art, strategy and cultural infrastructure considers how the systems we build today create the conditions for what becomes possible tomorrow. Rather than treating innovation as a clean break with the past, the conversation looks at it as an ongoing process of questioning, adapting and rebuilding: deciding what should move faster, what deserves more time, what should be preserved and what has reached the end of its usefulness. Within Designing for the Future, Time & Systems asks how we might create structures flexible enough to evolve while holding onto the values that made them necessary in the first place. 

Femi Adeyemi (he/him) 

The founder of NTS Radio. NTS was launched in London in 2011 and now broadcasts from over 70 cities around the World. Raised in London and with a keen interest in art, culture and particularly music. I'm an avid music collector particularly of jazz music.

Ash Arder (she/they) Ash Arder is a transdisciplinary artist whose research-based approach works to expose, deconstruct or reconfigure physical 

and conceptual systems – especially those related to ecology and/or industry. Ash manipulates physical and virtual environments to explore materials, mark-making, mechanical portraiture and sound design as tools for complicating dynamics of power between humans, machines and the lands they occupy. 

Ash is included in the 2026 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and has recently exhibited at the Swiss Institute, Cranbrook Art Museum, California African American Museum, Amant and NXTHVN. She is a 2026 Creative Capital State of the Art Prize awardee, 2025 Knight Foundation Arts + Tech Fellow, and 2023 Joan Mitchell Fellow. 

Jennifer Giroux (she/her)

Dr. Jennifer Giroux is a Detroit-based systems strategist, social researcher, and civic leader connecting power, place, and 

possibility. Across two decades in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the United States, she has examined and shaped invisible structures organizing everyday life - from conflict and critical infrastructure to education, organizational culture, and urban space. Her career spans research at ETH Zurich, United Nations work, and leadership in African education systems. 

She is principal of Giroux Impact, advising organizations navigating complex change, and a Strategy Fellow at the University of Michigan’s African Studies Center. She is co-founder of Brightside Collective, transforming land into ecological and cultural infrastructure. In Detroit, she advances cleaner air, tree equity, neighborhood power, and democratic participation. Trained in anthropology, Giroux asks how systems function and whose lives they enable, constrain, or overlook. Her work bridges global systems and neighborhood action to reimagine inherited structures for just, life-giving futures.

Mike Banks (he/him) 

"Mad Mike" Banks is a prolific musician and producer. As the co-founder of the Underground Resistance record label as well as the Submerge music distribution company, he has an extensive knowledge of systems of distribution, commerce, and creative processes. As a world traveler, he's also aware of how certain systems operate in different countries and how they might benefit systems here at home.